Change User Account Settings Windows 8

Hi, you are watching VisiHow. Previously, we discussed how to set up a Microsoft account on your Windows 8 computer, PC, tablet, laptop, whatever it may be, desktop even. Now what we're going to do is walk you through the 'more account settings online' area where you can select different options and different things that you may want to use for your PC.

Steps

1

Let's go ahead and get started with that.

What we are going to do is click the 'more account settings online' link. Obviously, as you can see my mouse pointer does not change into a hand or a finger to indicate that the 'more account settings online' text is a link but it is, so go ahead and click that.

"Hi, Visi", here is a lovely photo of me. "Hi, Visi here is where you manage your account" and then your email appears there. So we have a number of things here in the Microsoft account, we have 'home', our basic info, payment and billing, phones, and our security and privacy. Now these also appear below. Not necessarily all of them, but as you can see we have basic info, edit your details, change marketing preferences, manage aliases, get account help, edit your profile, money and gift cards, recent purchases, and the ability to change our passwords or manage advanced security. Let's go ahead and start with these in the top area.

The display name if you want to change, let's go ahead and click on 'edit' and I will go ahead and walk you through that now.

Here I have my first name listed as Visi, and my last name listed as How. I could put these together. I could delete the last name and I could change it to something else. I'm not going to mess with it, so I'm just going to click cancel. However, if you wanted to change yours you could change it, and then click save.

I am not currently receiving promotional emails because I am not signed up for anything. I don't need to change any preferences, but if you have signed up and you feel like you are getting too much spam, you can go ahead and change your preferences and just turn it off.

This is an important one, let's go ahead and click on 'aliases' and I will explain it. Aliases are other email accounts that you can receive mail at. Now some people don't think that these are really that helpful, or that great, but personally I love them. If you are going to sign up for a magazine subscription online, sign up for a Domino's Pizza card, Pizza Hut pizza card, if you get things from Amazon, anything that you may have signed up for, you can simply click on add email alias. Add a new email alias or add an existing email address and if you want, to turn that off and disable it, or shut it down for a while you can. If you are using an email to sign up for something and you don't want those people to have your personal email information. You can use that. It is a great feature that I often use. Just don't tell my boss.

I don't have any services that I am paying for or being billed for. However, in the future will be setting up an account where we will show you how to set up an Xbox live thing and register with Outlook 365 and set that up. At that time we will have billing information, for now, we don't, but if you are going to be setting up billing information or you're going to be purchasing things from Microsoft.

There is a list of payment options so you can add money into your Microsoft account.

Additionally, we don't have a credit card, PayPal, where is your region, all of the standard information you expect for a credit card. On my personal account I use Microsoft and I purchase from them. I purchase two things from them, one thing is office related things like Microsoft Office 365, etc. and the second thing is apps. If you go online, you can buy an app from the Microsoft store for your phone. If you want to buy WhatsApp, for example, or you may want to buy Sid Meier's Civilization, anything you want to purchase that money is going to come from your account, so by setting up an account, you have access to that.

This is obvious; this is a help option for billing. But just to show you what it is in case you are one of those people who are concerned about what happens when I click the link, and wonder "Am I ever going to be able to get back when I click billing help?", you can click 'payment options' and go right back. Anything you want to see you just select one of these options, let's say 'review my transaction history'. There you go, click that, it opens up a separate set of sub-menus, manage my payment options, manage my billing info. Usually and unfortunately with Microsoft, you will not get the level of support that you may get with Apple. It will take you sometimes hours to get a person on the phone, and when you get someone on the phone they may not know what they are doing; they may not be able to help you. That is unfortunate; however, Microsoft does sometimes have very helpful sets of information that can help you navigate through problems. However, other times you will encounter a problem that you cannot fixed and you will need to call someone. That will of course depend on which product you have, unfortunately, we cannot create a guide that says how to call Microsoft because each of their departments and each of their functions are separate and depend on what you need and where you are trying to go. So, enough about that, let's click back on 'overview' to see again that we still have nothing. You can scroll over at the bottom also.

We did not set up a phone with this, and I am not going to set up a phone with this, but you could. So you add in a phone, a cell phone or whatever, and you can find it on a map. Protect your personal data and get support. When we set up our Windows phone, we have a tutorial for a Windows phone, we will show you how to do this, but for now, I am not going to show you anything about it because were not setting up Windows phone but later we will do that.

This is our last option, and this is really good. You can change your password, see recent activity, see what has happened, where you have been browsing, and what has been going on. This is especially helpful if you have children who may be browsing and you are concerned about what they're looking at.

We have family safety settings, manage permission for children, manage the Xbox privacy, and online safety, Bing safe search, you can control pretty much anything that happens with this account right from here.

Windows live profile, Xbox live profile, and any connected accounts that you have.

What can use your information and what can't. This is something I don't use as much. But let's say you don't want a particular application from Microsoft to have access to your information, you can stop it from having access to that.

If this happens and you see that you are on this page and you think to yourself, "oh wow, how do I get back to where I was?" Just go down here to the bottom, you can close the Bing window, or you can go back to the Microsoft account.

As you can see, we have now gone through everything with your Microsoft account that you can do.

These are all the additional functions and options that you will have. You will want to set them up yourself. We will also come back to some of these later, such as family safety settings, managing permissions for children, Xbox safe search, Windows live profile, etc. However, those videos are for another date. Thanks for using VisiHow, have a great day, and we will look forward to seeing you again in our next video.

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